AWS helps you reduce your overall IT costs in multiple ways. With AWS you can replace your upfront capital expense with low variable cost and pay only for the resources you consume. AWS's economies of scale, and efficiency improvements, allow AWS to continually lower prices, while multiple pricing models allow you to optimize your costs for both variable and stable workloads.

Amazon Web Services provides you with the flexibility to choose a pricing model that best matches your business needs. This whitepaper covers how AWS pricing works. Discussions include how to lower your costs as you purchase more AWS with tiered pricing, On-Demand pricing for instantly available resources, lowering costs through the use of Reserve instances, and name-your-price options on the Spot Instance market. This whitepaper also give pricing examples so you can see how different pricing options deliver cost savings.

No minimum commitments or long-term contracts required. You replace your upfront capital expense with low variable cost and pay only for what you use. In essence, you convert your capital expense into variable expense.

You save more as you grow bigger. For storage and data transfer, pricing is tiered. The more you use, the less you pay per gigabyte. For compute, you get volume discounts up to 10% when you reserve more.

For certain services like Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS, you can invest in reserved capacity. In that case, you pay a low upfront fee and get a significantly discounted hourly rate, which results in overall savings up to 60% (depending on the type of instance you reserve) over equivalent On-Demand capacity.

AWS is constantly focused on reducing our data center infrastructure costs and improving our operational efficiencies. These optimizations, and AWS’s growing economies of scale, result in passing savings back to you in the form of lower prices. Since 2006, AWS has lowered pricing 45 times.

There are three fundamental characteristics you pay for with AWS: compute, storage, and data transfer out. These characteristics vary slightly depending on the AWS product you are using. However, fundamentally these are the core characteristics that have the greatest impact on your AWS cost.

To help new AWS customers get started in the cloud, AWS is introduced a free usage tier. The free tier can be used for anything you want to run in the cloud: launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with AWS.

Select from the dropdown menu below to see all AWS Free Tier available products.